I created a symbolic link, and now I am getting a 404 errors.

Your symbolic link is absolute, not relative. Since the real directory is different than what you see in the shell environment, the link is actually broken from the view of the web server, so the 404s are accurate. For example, if you created a symbolic link in /htdocs/www like this:

example -> /htdocs/example

you would get 404 errors. You just have to make the link like this, instead:

example -> ../example.

Doing so will solve the 404 errors and still source http://yourdomain.com/example from http://example.yourdomain.com.